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I have owned one of the HF 50# top loading bench units for about 10 years now. No Evac system, but there is a port on the side with a filter on the inside for pressure relief. So I machined a fitting for the port and just hook it up to my shop vac. Works well enough.

The cabinet leaked like a sieve at ever seam when I first got it, and since the store was 100 mile drive, I didn't bother to take it back. Just disassembled it and used some silicone sealer between all mating metal surfaces. Reassembled, and once the sealer was dry, its been fine ever since.

This was the $99 unit, but I caught it on sale with a coupon for only $49. It has handled all the bead blasting for handguns and other small stuff for 10 years, so I guess it was worth the money. Still using the same ceramic nozzle, its never worn out.

Oh, and I did modify the siphon feed tube at the bottom of the cabinet so that it would stay submerged in the media, and pick up the glass media a bit better.

Had one floating around here for quite a few years. No problem with the sealing, but the light just sucks, have a drop light hanging in there now, and the air valve on the trigger is shot and won't shut off completely, just added a shut off on the side.

Dollars for doughnuts, its a decent value. It'll do you pretty good for quite a while before you have to start fixin' stuff.

build your own

I built mine out of plywood and bought the gun, glass windows,etc from T P tools and equipment.[www.tptools.com]
I bought a dust colecter from Grizzly.
If you do it this way you can make it any size or shape you want.
They also have plans and a lot of good info.

you can buy an attachment for a pressur washer to wet blast, no dust this way. I cleaned up a crudy cement mixer i bought for 25.00 and it did it in short order.
Steve
New to site

I've had the large H.F. Cabinet for more than ten years. I added three CFL bulbs inside with glass covers made out of canning jars and changed the gun to one that has carbide inner and outer tips. It works very well. I use copper slag at $8.00 per 100 # and the older it gets, the better it works. They call it a 50 # capacity but I put a whole 100 # bag in at one time. Why not?

You need something like a 20 cfm compressor to be able to use one of these units effectively.

Oh, I also added a new tempered glass window with a plastic liner that I change every few months and fixed the hand holes to larger openings. H.F. has excellent blasting gloves for $5.00 a pair. They last a long time. I use a large 2 hp/3,450 rpm Baldor/Cyclone dust collecter that connects with a 4" hose. I use this machine almost every day when i work in my shop. It leaks a little but not too bad. I even like the red paint. LOL. It looks like this.

Steve: I have a home-built unit but I made it too small and I made the angle of the chute at the bottom too shallow so the media doesn't flow nicely down to the pickup tube. It's frustrating to use. I think I can sell it on Craigslist which makes the cost of the HF unit even less.

As far as guns go, the one I have now is made from hardware store pipe fittings and works just fine and won't overrun my compressor. The nozzle is a piece of 1/8 pipe which is so cheap to replace that it isn't worth trying to come up with anything else.

Ended up with one in the back of the truck. By joining their stupid buyers' club (that is, the club for stupid buyers), I got another 20 percent off, but adding the cost of the club back in, the savings was only $14. But hey, $14 is $14. The only downside is that now my mailbox will be choked with their ads. I declined to provide my email address.

Anyway, I put it together and it is a big, big improvement over the home-built rig. I just didn't know what I was missing. Fit and finish is much better than I usually expect from HF. I also bought a regulator since I just learned that bead blasting should not be done over 60 PSI or the beads will break down early and all you'll have in short order is dust. The cheapo regulator leaks like the Titanic so it's going back tomorrow. I also learned that one should not fill the cabinet with grit any more than necessary for good pickup. Too much and you'll have pickup problems, so they say.

But the gun works great. The cab. has a fitting on the side that hooks right up to the shop vac hose and the gloves are nice and big and fit my size XXXX hands. No leaks of grit yet. When I return the defective regulator, I'll pick up one of their cheap movers' dollies and fit it to the bottom of the cabinet so I can roll it around the shop if needed. It's cheaper to buy the dolly than to buy the casters separately.

The photo is eight-year-old Alex cleaning the rust off a piece of 1/2 CRS that we'll use for a simple electric motor we're making together. He and his older brother come over once a week for "shop class."